Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Mullah, It's Over

Spreading the Wealth Around to the Insurance Industry and Friends

by Dean Baker

This is the time when the excrement starts hitting the fan. The lobbyists are in overdrive, rounding up members of Congress just like the cowboys of the Old West would bring in the herd.

The industry groups will also have their friends in the news media working overtime hyping any possible obstacle to health care reform. And they are filling the airwaves with scary ads, warning that people will never be able to see a doctor again if meaningful health care reform passes.

Since there are trillions of dollars at stake, the effort is understandable. The basic story is simple. The insurance, pharmaceutical and medical supply industries, along with the hospitals and the American Medical Association, have rigged the deck so that they get rich at the public's expense. They have structured our health care system so that we pay more than twice as much per person as people in other wealthy countries, even though we get worse care by many measures.

The bloat in the health care sector is projected to grow rapidly over the next decade as health care consumes an ever larger share of the economy. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) reports that just the increase in health care spending share of the economy over the next decade will cost us $4.3 trillion. That is equal to a health care tax of $57,000 for an average family of four.

Who benefits from the taxpayers generosity? CMS projects that $1.4 trillion, or $18,500 per family will go to the hospitals. Doctors and the pharmaceutical companies are each expected to score about $550 billion, costing families $7,300. And the insurance industry's share of GDP is projected to rise by $360 billion, or $4,800 for an average family.

These massive transfers are not the result of the wonders of the free market. These folks are getting money out of our pockets because their friends in Congress have rigged the deck so the money flows from us to them. For example, the government grants the pharmaceutical industry patent monopolies that prevent normal competition in the prescription drug market.

Unlike every other country in the world, the United States lets the drug companies use their government-granted monopolies to charge whatever they want. As a result, we pay nearly twice as much for our prescription drugs as people in countries like Canada and Germany.

Similarly, doctors are able to tightly control the supply of both US trained physicians and the number of doctors that can enter the country from abroad. If custodians had the same control over the labor market for janitors, they would all be making $80,000 a year.

http://www.truthout.org/062209R?n

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Run for your life! Socialized medicine!

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The TV Business Is Toast

by Henry Blodget

The traditional TV industry -- cable companies, networks, and broadcasters -- is where the newspaper industry was about five years ago:

In denial.

There are murmurings on the edges about how longstanding business models will come under pressure as Internet distribution takes over. But, so far, the revenue and profits are hanging in there, so the big TV companies don't really care.

Specifically, the TV industry's attitude is the same as the newspaper industry's attitude was circa 2002-2003: Stop calling us dinosaurs: We get digital; We're growing our digital businesses; We're investing in digital platforms; People still recall ads even when they fast-forward through them on DVRs; There's no substitute for TV ads. Traditional TV isn't going away: Just look at our revenue and profits!

After saying all this same stuff for years, the newspaper industry figured out the hard way that you can't stuff the genie back in the bottle. And over the next 5-10 years, the TV industry will figure this out, too.

Here's the problem in a nutshell:

As with print-based media, Internet-based distribution generates only a tiny fraction of the revenue and profit that today's incumbent cable, broadcast, and satellite distribution models do. As Internet-based distribution gains steam, therefore, most TV industry incumbents will no longer be able to support their existing cost structures.

Specifically, TV business models for the past half-century, from broadcast to cable to satellite, have been built on the following foundation:

Not much else to do at home that's as simple and fun as TV
No way to get video content other than via TV
No options other than TV for advertisers who want to tell video stories
No options other than cable -- and, more recently, satellite -- to get TV
Tight choke-points in each market through which all video content has to flow (cable company, airwaves), which creates enormous value for the owners of those gates.

And now, slowly but surely, look what's happening:

Other simple options emerging at home: Internet, video games, Facebook, IM, DVDs
New ways to get TV other than satellite/cable: Hulu, YouTube, iTunes, Netflix
Video-ad options beginning to emerge
More options for getting video content: telcos, cable cos, wireless cos (soon)
Fewer choke points in each market: With an Internet connection anywhere in the world, you will soon be able to get to almost anything. And not just to your computer -- to your television.

Thus far, the TV industry has reacted to these changes the way most people would: By trying to port its existing model to the new world and maintain its hold on power and money. This is why we're getting so many ridiculous, consumer-unfriendly TV solutions, such as:

Market-based control over what you can and can't watch (thanks to contracts with local cable companies)
No live-streaming of lots of popular video content despite the fact that this would grow the audience (same reason)
Time-shifting of popular shows (don't want to cannibalize more profitable TV audience)
Hoarding of video libraries that could be easily available, watched, and monetized online
Single episode downloads that expire after 24 hours
$150/month "triple-play" solutions that come larded up with absurd taxes, fees, and service-charges, most of which go to pay for crap we don't want.

All these Band-Aid solutions will eventually fail.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/henry-blodget/the-tv-business-is-toast_b_216243.html

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Elmer Fudd Nation

by Mark Ames

Angelo Mozilo and His 300 Million Slapstick Foils

If I was an oligarch and I wanted to buy my spoiled little shit of a son a toy that would make him laugh and laugh for hours, I'd buy him a middle-class American. Because Americans are funny the way all dupes and chumps are funny. You can trick today's Americans time and again, and they always fall for it. And when you trick them, they stomp around dramatically and make a lot of blustery noise about "the people" who allegedly "aren't going to stand much more of this" because "our founding forefathers bla bla bla" and of course the ol' "you can fool some of the people some of the time, buttcha can't fool bla bla bla..." Basically, if you've seen your Elmer Fudd, then you've seen your American sucker in all of his cartoon comic-foil glory: a sentimental buffoon, a harmless chump whose guns don't fool anyone but himself.

Every day, Americans play the role of Elmer Fudd to the oligarchy's Bugs Bunny--if you look at it from the oligarchy's point of view, at least.

Exhibit A: Multigazllionaire scumbag Angelo Mozilo v. American Suckers.

Tuesday it was reported that Mozilo, the guy who destroyed millions of Americans' lives and now faces fraud charges, is making American taxpayers—his victims—pay for his legal defense. Yup, Bank of America, which only exists thanks to tens of billions of taxpayer dollars, is using YOUR MONEY to defend Angelo Mozilo against YOU, the victim.

Bank of America paying Mozilo's legal fees

Tue Jun 9, 2009 3:59pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Bank of America Corp said on Tuesday it is covering the legal fees of Angelo Mozilo, the former Countrywide Financial Corp chief executive charged with securities fraud and insider trading.

Lawyers for the former executives last week said they planned to fight the SEC's claims.

Bank of America has taken $45 billion from the U.S. government's Troubled Asset Relief Program.

What makes this really funny is that Mozilo doesn't even need your money, because he's already stolen at least half a billion from you suckers... But he's taking taxpayer dollars to defend himself anyway, for the same reason that dogs lick their balls: BECAUSE IT TICKLES!

Mozilo's Monster Payday

JANUARY 11, 2008

By Dana Cimilluca

According to the LA Times, Mozilo stands to get a severance package valued at more than $110 million. That would be on top of $140 million of his Countrywide stake that Mozilo sold in 2006 and 2007, as the housing wave crested and then crashed. (In fact, as the Wall Street Journal points out, from 2004 through 2007, he sold a total of about $414 million of Countrywide shares - sales that drew the attention of the SEC.)

In 2006 alone, Mozilo, who built Countrywide into a thriving mortgage institution over nearly 40 years, got paid $48 million, according to the company's last proxy statement.

Yup, he gets over half a billion dollars, and you, the victim, pay him to defend himself from you. And what makes it so funny is that no American will ever do a thing to harm a hair on Mr. Mozilo's head. No matter what, even if you're the guy who's living in a Sam's Club tent, you won't do a thing about it. AHHH-HA-HA-HA-HA!!!

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/22347

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Fear of mice

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History lesson from hell

A do-it-yourself "Does the Government Deceive the People" test.

By Bob Patterson

Before D-Day, the Allies held a practice amphibious training exercise. Due to a combination of factors hundreds of men died.

The tragedy was classified top secret and participants were required to keep it top secret. British citizens near that beach were sworn to secrecy.

A few years back, NBC did a report on "Operation Tiger" for the Evening News.

Do your own fact-checking and go to Google and see how much you can learn. During the night of 28 April 1944, "Operation Tiger," an amphibious training exercise held in Lyme Bay, near Slapton Sands, things went very wrong. If you don't find much information about it, then perhaps you might want to begin to reexamine some of the top conspiracy theories that are predicated on the idea that the government kept some facts away from the public.

One source lists the number of killed as 749 making it the most costly training exercise in World War II.

Here are some links to get the at-home fact checkers started:

http://www.qmmuseum.lee.army.mil/historyweek/22-28apr.htm

http://www.combinedops.com/Op_Tiger.htm

http://www.nowpublic.com/world/remembering-operation-tiger-wwii-six-weeks-d-day

http://bartblog.bartcop.com/2009/06/17/a-do-it-yourself-%E2%80%9Cdoes-the-government-deceive-the-people%E2%80%9D-test/

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Quotes

"You and I are both students of history and we've seen this movie before. When Ronald Reagan stood up for the workers in Gdansk in Poland, when he stood up for the people of Czechoslovakia, in Prague Spring, and America did. And some good Democrats did, too."

- always wrong McCain, trying to drag Obama into Iran's civil war, Link

"Tell me again who it was who committed treason against our country by making back-room deal with the Ayatollah (oh, was that the same Iran that's in the news today?) 'yeah Ayatollah, you just make sure you keep those hostages until after the election and we'll give you the weapons you need to fight Saddam.'"
- AmericasBack, Link

"And don't forget when Saint Ronnie stood up for states rights in 1861!"

- Bob Wurst, Link

"Remember when Reagan beat the Nazis with his bare hands?"
- spring heeled jack, Link

"And how he ended WWI by playing rock paper scissors with the Kaiser..."

- Bob Wurst, Link

"Ronald Reagan represents all of the worst elements of the American political experience of the last 50 years. All of them. He was, and always will be, nothing but a steaming hot pile of filthy hyena puke. Intellectually, Reagan gave chimpy a run for his money. He was vacuous. He was shallow. He was incurious. He was a puppet and a door stop for a group of sick ideologues who really ran the country. He was a shitty actor and foolish tool. Ideologically, he was a hater and an imperialist and far-right loony-tune. He hated the poor. He hated gays. He hated leftists. He hated communists - and he was pretty sure you were one if you disagreed with him. Ronald Reagan was a twisted unrepentant closed-minded shit-bag hate monger. And that's just for starters. Fuck Ronald Reagan. Then fuck him again."
-- Truth2Tell Link

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Blog Posts From Iran's Metal and Hip Hop Artists: Is Music the Weapon of the Future in Iran?

by Mark Levine

Please note: I'm updating this post as I get new emails/tweets/calls from artists in Iran, so keep checking for new material.

Despite a general ban on most forms of popular music by the Islamic government in Iran, rock music has become one of the most vibrant forces for critiquing the various ills of Iranian society, and the basic ideology of the Islamic Republic as well.

When I last visited Iran I was amazed at how vibrant, and how courageous, the heavy metal and Hip Hop scenes had become. Long before the current violence, metalheads were willing to risk arrest, forced haircuts in jail, beatings and even threats to their families in order to pursue the music they love. The loose clothing and short hair favored by hip hoppers have made them a less obvious target for regime thugs and morality police; but both extreme metal artists and hip hoppers in Iran have been arrested for the politically and socially charged nature of their music, which circulated throughout the internet despite the best attempts of the government to stop it.

Music, and artistic expression more broadly, has always been a core part of Persian culture. While music has yet to play a public role in the protests similar to the role of artists in the Beirut Spring of 2006, they are working behind the scenes, using their art as a way to write about the experiences of the last week, and to describe a vision for a better future.

I have been in contact with some of the most innovative and talented artists in Iran over the last few days. Below are some of the emails they've sent me describing what they've been experiencing. I've changed the names to protect their identities, but to quote one rapper about the his use of Tupac Shakur's lyrics, "Those who know, will get it..."

The great Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti titled his last album "Music is the Weapon of the Future." In the current protests in Iran, it is bubbling under the surface, and will help shape the way the still young Revolution will develop now, and be remembered later. For more information about Iranian metal and hip hop artists, including links to their videos and music from the forthcoming EMI album Flowers in the Desert, please visit here . I have uploaded the galley from the chapter of Heavy Metal Islam dealing with Iran here to help contextualize the situation in Iran vis-a-vis its all important youth culture.

For more analysis on this issue you can see my articles on the protests at al-Jazeera's English website here, for the Social Science Research Council here, and for the Huffpo here.

And if you are an Iranian artist/musician/rapper, or know any who want to share their experiences, please have them contact me at mlevine@uci.edu.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-levine/blog-posts-from-irans-met_b_217517.html

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Neocons Are Clueless About Iran

By Leslie Savan

The Iran protests have thrown Republican ideologues into such a tizzy of circular logic that they're stepping on their own propaganda.

Neocons and hardliners may be as eager as ever to bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb bomb Iran, but are restrained this time out by the feeling that they must support Iran's courageous protesters. After all, the Twittering Green Revolutionaries, as the rightwing brain sees it, are marching in the name of George W. Bush's own vision of a "democratic Middle East," the same vision that led him to occupy Iran's next-door neighbor. ("That's not meddling at all," says conservative conventional wisdom poobah Fred Barnes. "That's supporting the people who see America as a model that they like to emulate.") Yet at the same time, the GOP worries about the meaning of an eventual Mousavi victory in the streets -- neocons in particular have openly hoped for Ahmadinejad's survival, for fear that a more reasonable face on the Islamic Revolution might preclude future opportunities for either us or Israel to bomb Iran back to the 7th Century (where Ahmadinejad would like to take his country anyway).

And worst of all, if the demonstrations bring about a regime change in Tehran, the world might well ascribe it, as they have the election of moderates in Lebanon, to the Obama Effect and his Cairo speech. That would be a neocon catastrophe, quite possibly sweeping us toward a moderate, compromised resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well (before Netanyahu and crew have settled all the land they want). So folks like California congressman Dana Rohrabacher are now calling Obama a "cream puff" -- since, after all, he won't sing along with "bomb-bomb-bomb..."

Never mind that taking sides in the Iranian conflict would give the Ahmadinejad supporters a plausible excuse to blame America for what is so clearly a domestic dispute and grant them the perfect excuse to use overwhelming violence. But any victory without the use of force simply has no flavor for the GOP. And besides, there's a special Tehranian tic buried deep in the Republican party.

It was, after all, the 1979 hostage crisis that paved the way for Ronald Reagan's presidency, and it was his decision to sell arms to the ayatollahs in order to raise a slush fund to fight the Sandinistas that shattered faith in his honesty. Persia tasks the GOP like a black whale (it has ever since the West lost control of those oil fields), and there is almost no law of man or nature they won't try to overthrow to get it back.

http://www.alternet.org/world/140805/neocons_are_clueless_about_iran/

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Sotomayor Fight Eroding What’s Left Of Latino Support For GOP?

by Greg Sargent

New poll numbers really seem to bear out the fears of some Republicans: The GOP's quasi-opposition to Sotomayor seems to be hurting the party among Latinos in a big way.

The latest numbers from the nonpartisan Research 2000 for Daily Kos find that only eight percent of Latinos view the party favorably, while an astonishing 86 percent view it unfavorably.

That's a real shift from what were already pretty bad numbers from before the Sotomayor nominatino, when 11% of Latinos viewed the GOP favorably, and 79% viewed it unfavorably.

One of the big stories today is that Republicans are realizing that there's no political percentage in fighting the Sotomayor nomination. It's striking that Latino opinion about the GOP is dropping so fast, even at a moment when GOP opposition to Sotomayor appears to be flagging, as opposed to intensifying.

This continuing drop among Latinos, coming at a time when many party strategists recognize the party's desperate need to broaden its appeal, only reminds us that not only are there few apparent upsides in opposing Sotomayor, there are potentially serious costs, too.

http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/stimulus-package/sotomayor-fight-eroding-whats-left-of-latino-support-for-gop/

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Under Misspelled Banner, Buchanan And White Nationalist Brimelow Argue For English-Only Initiatives

On Saturday, Pat Buchanan hosted a conference to discuss how Republicans can regain a majority in America. During one discussion, panelists suggested supporting English-only initiatives as a prime way of attracting "working class white Democrats." The discussion ridiculed Judge Sotomayor for the fact that she studied children's classics to improve her grammar while attending college. The panelists also suggested that, without English as the official language, President Obama would force Americans to speak Spanish.

One salient feature of the event was the banner hanging over the English-only advocates. The word conference was spelled "Conferenece." View it here:

The panelists pressed on with their anti-bilingualism diatribe without noting the irony of the obvious misspelling on the banner.

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/06/22/misspelled-english-buchanan/

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Timid Obama Succumbs to Old Politics

by Froma Harrop

This has been a tough week for the hopeful ones who believed President Obama's vow to break with the old politics. Every day, it seems, the president caved in to another Democratic interest group working against the public weal.

Let's start with the mayors' conference just ended in Providence, R.I. One hundred Obama administration officials canceled their plans to attend, rather than cross a firefighters' picket line set up to embarrass the host, Providence Mayor David Cicilline. The mayor was trying to curb the workers' gold-plated benefits in a city reeling under an 11.3 percent unemployment rate. The no-shows included Vice President Biden, Attorney General Eric Holder and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan.

The mayors were none too happy. Their cities are in economic crisis. They had a lot to discuss with administration officials. And dealing with their own public-employee dramas, they could imagine themselves in Cicilline's shoes.

As Miami Mayor Manny Diaz, president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, put it: "None of us in this room are insulated from the economic challenges faced by the city of Providence. This will not be the last time this administration will be asked to make a similar choice."

A little more background: Providence has among the best-paid firefighters in the country. The union is willing to raise the minimum years of service for getting a pension from 20 to 25, which means someone could still join the force at 19 and retire at 44. It won't negotiate a minimum retirement age or do anything to reduce the exorbitant cost-of-living increases that for some former firefighters double pension payments every 11 years, however.

One firefighter, a former chief, is collecting a disability pension that pays him $13,000 a month, tax-free. The city supports its firefighters with very high property taxes, but only 55 of the 459 live there.

It was over such "grievances" that the Obama administration virtually boycotted a national mayors' conference.

http://www.creators.com/liberal/froma-harrop/timid-obama-succumbs-to-old-politics.html

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As Blogs Are Censored, It’s Kittens to the Rescue

By NOAM COHEN

To censor the Internet painlessly, undetectably, is the dream that keeps repressive governments up late at their mainframe computers. After all, no users are so censored online as those who never see it.

What government could bring itself to block this?

The Iranian government is carrying out an Internet crackdown in hopes of subduing the protest movement that has surged since the disputed results of the presidential election on June 12. At the same time, the Iranian government has been sending out the police to restrain protesters and foreign journalists.

Thus far, however, the Iranian government has learned the difficulty of trying to control the Internet in half-steps. Because the government's censorship efforts are so evident — transparent, even — there is a battle raging online to keep Iran connected to the world digitally, and thus connected to the world. Sympathizers around the world are guiding Iranians to safe access to the Internet and are hosting and publicizing material that is being banned within Iran.

If only Iran's leaders had thought through the implications of what can be called the Cute Cat Theory of Internet Censorship, as propounded by Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. His idea is deceptively simple: most people use the Internet to enjoy their lives, and among the ways people spread joy is to share pictures of cute cats. Even the sarcastic types (who, for example, have been known to insert misspelled messages under pictures of kittens) seem to be under their thrall.

So when a government censors the Internet, it had better think twice: "Cute cats are collateral damage when governments block sites," Mr. Zuckerman wrote for a recent talk. People who could not "care less about presidential shenanigans are made aware that their government fears online speech so much that they're willing to censor the millions of banal videos" and thereby "block a few political ones."

As it happens, Mr. Zuckerman said, the Iranian government's censorship task has been made harder because there is a thriving blogging community there, which he attributes to an earlier Iranian censorship campaign against traditional print media, in 2003. Writers flocked to the Internet. This fact, combined with a history of blocking access to social media tools since at least 2004, means that a large group of computer-savvy communicators "have had five years to figure out" how to get their message out.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/technology/internet/22link.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

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